Fall 2016 Theories of Justice Professor Pevnick (
[email protected]) Office: 19 West 4th St., #326 Office Hours: Tuesday 9:30-11:30am or by appointment Course Description Political life is rife with conflict regarding issues of justice. This includes disputes regarding the legitimate role of government and the appropriate distribution of resources. Consider the following questions: • Is economic inequality unjust? Ever? Always? Why? • Is government justified in restricting your freedom if it does so in order to improve your life (by, say, banning large sodas, forcing you to wear a seatbelt, or making heroin illegal)? • Is it justifiable for the state to take the resources of wealthy citizens in order to benefit their poorer compatriots? Must the state do so in order to be legitimate? • How should a commitment to political equality guide attempts at campaign finance reform? • What are human rights? Where do they come from? Are they a culturally insensitive Western project? Since most of us hold views about the appropriate answers to such questions and believe that we can defend these views by providing reasons on their behalf, argument about questions of justice is an ordinary feature of political life. Political theory is, in two ways, the natural extension of such argument. First, by working such arguments out in more careful detail, political theorists hope to present stronger and more defensible versions of them—ones that can avoid the objections and errors to which our first inclinations may be vulnerable. Second, in answering such questions, we often rely on concepts – such as justice, rights, legitimacy, liberty, and equality – that can be understood in a wide variety of ways.